Empowered Consumer
Today’s consumers are taking charge of their shopping experience – using their preferred devices and channels to become informed and empowered before they even engage with retailers. For example, shoppers have easy access to peer reviews and can both solicit and share opinions and experiences via web and social throughout the shopping experience. And they expect a unique, personalized and seamless experience while keeping their identity and data secure.
This leads to a much more complex relationship between retailer and consumer as consumers expect each point of engagement with a retailer to be connected and consistent.
The boundaries between virtual and physical space are becoming blurred in this omni channel environment. The focus of the retail experience has expanded well beyond the walls of the retailers’ physical store and can include multiple channels such as catalogs, call centers, mobile commerce,, online and social networks— indeed, shoppers are engaging with retailers and products in so many more ways than they did in the past..
The challenge for retailers becomes staying relevant and compelling to their increasingly connected audience today while also reaching new audiences. Retailer Response To survive and thrive, retailers need to adapt and put the customer at the heart of their shifting businesses – whether shopping through traditional brick and mortar stores, or catalogs, call centers, and online.
Retailers can no longer treat different channels as separate businesses with separate systems and managed by separate teams, which can result in lack of visibility across channels and an inability to follow and track customers as they move across different channels. A single, integrated strategy for driving compelling customer experiences while controlling costs has now become the standard. But realizing this requires strategic focus across multiple areas of the business. Thriving in this new retail reality means retailers need to be more connected, more empowered, and more proactive than ever before. In a word, they need to be dynamic in order to: Engage Customers: Globally reach connected customers how, when, and where they shop. Ready employees: Increase employee productivity and effectiveness and help their most valuable asset—people—to provide the best possible customer service experience. Expand rapidly: Anticipate trends and capitalize on opportunities through a 360-degree view of the business. And all this while protecting customer data at every interaction point.
Microsoft Dynamics for Retail Microsoft Dynamics for Retail is a modern, unified retail solution that reduces complexity for retailers, allowing them to focus on connecting with customers and empowering their employees across all channels. It empowers organizations to deliver a complete shopping experience—personal, seamless, and differentiated—by helping them with a single view of the business.
Microsoft Dynamics for Retail provides customer engagement capabilities that include store operations, channel management, order management, marketing and care, and business intelligence and also more back office capabilities like procurement and financialsin an end-to-end solution delivering full visibility across the entire business operation while empowering users. These capabilities can be implemented as a comprehensive end-to-end solution or as individual business functions to complement existing technologies—allowing retailers to select the option that makes the most sense for them.
Retail Functions We have you covered – from front office to back office, from designing your customer touch programs and driving transactions, and all the while, gathering data on those transactions so that you can analyze and make informed decisions to drive ROI.
Core Retail Deep Dive
Channel
Manage multiple channels seamlessly to achieve unprecedented customer centricity while also being able to create new and compelling customer engagement and loyalty scenarios.
Point of Sale (POS) Superior store systems consolidates customers’ purchase intelligence such as sales history, transaction details and wish list, and provides the right information at the right time for sales associates to better guide and recommend their customers based on purchase patterns and preferences.
Transaction, Gift, Loyalty Processing
Cash and drawer management
Customer data capture, Purchase History, Wishlist, Recommendations
Inventory Receipt, Reporting, Stock Counts
Clientelling
e-commerce Take your e-commerce strategy to the next level with a fully integrated online storefront with search-based technology that offers accurate, timely, consistent performance.
Web Content Management and Site Development
Destination based taxation
Reserve and collect
Dynamic Refiners and Recommendations
Real-time Inventory Updates and Catalogue Management
Shopping Cart, Payments
Marketing Easily plan, execute, and measure campaigns from start to finish. Bring your marketing vision to life—engage customers with personalized, multi-channel campaigns, build pipeline, and demonstrate the impact of your marketing.
Content & Spend Management
Execution Planning
Campaign Nurturing and Automation
Media Buying and Planning
Contact Center Use the Contact (or Call Center) for order entry, order processing and order ful fillment Retailers can offer mail order catalogs to their customers and manage this streamlined channel.
Case and Claim management
Contact Center, Self-Serve, Mobile, Chat
Portals, Social, Knowledge Base
Social In today’s social and mobile world, businesses need to move faster and share knowledge more broadly than ever before. They also need to connect to customers on their terms, which means including social channels in your omni-channel strategy. Social insights can facilitate amazing customer experiences, ensuring that messages resonate while highlighting trends that impact your brand. Implement promotions, discounts, coupons, and more via social sites Monitor, publish content, knowledge management, brand awareness
Retail Operations Achieve real-time operational excellence and insights by connecting your warehousing, stores, online business, POS, and head office.
Store Operations Can help you track inventory real time, maintain accounts receivables, keep customers coming back with customer loyalty, save time by maintaining labor records, track layaways, track work orders, back orders, sales orders, quotes and much more:
Statements and cash reconciliation
POS Profile & UI Management
Loyalty Execution and Program Management
Pricing, Promotions and Offer Management
Store configuration and Assortment Management
Supply Chain & Logistics To have control, you need to know a real time view of your business and products. And with control, you can have more efficient people and processes, a better handle on costs, happier customers and, ultimately, greater profits.
Buying
Replenishment
Order Management
Warehouse, Transportation Logistics
Sales Force Automation Win faster by making every customer conversation more relevant, valuable, and productive. And you can sell more with better insight, understanding, and pipeline confidence.
Lead/Opportunity and Account Management
Pipeline management, prospecting
Sales order processing
Platform Benefits When you invest in a retail solution from Microsoft, it means that as well as class leading capabilities for your industry you are also able to leverage all of the benefits of a microsoft platform..
Business Intelligence: Take the data you are capturing across all of your channels, combine it with data from other data sources and put into meaningful visualizations and reports to drive your business forward and turn insight into action. Simply put, get to know your customer better and see more clearly how your company is performing. You’ll have a wealth of insights presented through familiar self-service capabilities, dashboards and reports. Our role-tailored, personalized dashboards are designed specifically for individual jobs, so people get the information most relevant to them. We put the data that they need at their fingertips—literally—providing them with the right information, at the right time helping them to convert insights into impact.
Workflow: Leverage Windows Workflow Foundation and enable users to create system or human workflows in Dynamics AX. Windows Workflow Foundation can be used to solve simple scenarios, such as showing UI controls based on user input, or complex scenarios encountered by large enterprises, such as order processing and inventory control thus removing some of the manual operations inherent in there types of processes.
Mobile Solutions: Having access to the same line-of-business applications you rely upon in the office while you're away is a critical component of many companies today. Mobile access to these applications was once a competitive advantage—now it's a business essential. For those organizations with field sales, mobile professionals, mobile service technicians, or support staff, connected mobile solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics and the Windows Mobile platform create greater efficiencies, help open new business opportunities, drive increased productivity, and reduce costs. Mobile solutions for Microsoft Dynamics provide a familiar, flexible, and financially compelling mobile solutions platform.
Interoperability: Microsoft Dynamics and other Microsoft products and technologies are built to deliver pervasive interoperability, giving users a consistent, familiar experience, seamless interaction with Microsoft Office delivering improved collaboration across the extended supply chain.
Beyond Traditional Retail Functions Dynamics for Retail not only includes the core retail operations functionality but you can also deploy extended business functions such as Procurement & Sourcing; Manufacturing and Transport & Warehouse Management and extend your business to include CRM functionality
Deployment Flexibility Customers can deploy a complete solution to run their entire retail operation or they can deploy specific business functions with the option to expand into others later. Unlike the best-of-breed approach where multiple solutions, have to be integrated middleware causes an added layer of complexity and disconnect,, Microsoft Dynamics offers a more accurate, timely, and consistent user experience with a single data model, business rules, and architecture. Start with the components most critical to your business, and proceed at the pace that’s right for you. Microsoft Dynamics can be deployed on the cloud, through third party hosted partner clouds or Microsoft Azure via Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), bringing customer’s true choice and portability between on-premises and private cloud deployments, along with all the benefits and security features that come with the world-class Microsoft Azure service. Take advantage of the solution’s flexibility: extend it quickly and easily to new locations and geographies as your business grows. Perform some operations in the cloud, others on-premises. It’s all part of the unique differentiation of Microsoft Dynamics for Retail that will enable you to differentiate your business with customers.
